ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN ANNOUNCE NO PROGRESS IN KARABAKH TALKS IN ROMANIA

AP Worldstream
Jun 06, 2006

The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia said Tuesday that
talks between their countries’ leaders had made no progress toward
a settlement of the dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, but
that they had instructions to continue negotiations.

Armenian President Robert Kocharian and Azerbaijani President Ilham
Aliev discussed the long-standing conflict on the sidelines of a
Black Sea summit in Bucharest, Romania, on Sunday and Monday.

Representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, which is trying to broker a resolution of the 18-year-old
conflict, were also present.

Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian told state television that
the talks had been conducted “in a normal atmosphere, but they did
not succeed in registering progress and giving a positive impulse to
solving the problem of the Karabakh conflict.”

Still, he said that he and Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar
Mammadyarov had orders to try to find points on which they could
bring the two countries’ positions closer.

Mammadyarov said that, in spite of the lack of a breakthrough, the
Aliev-Kocharian meeting had seen a “wide discussion” of the details
of a settlement.

“We decided to continue the process and, if necessary, to hold another
meeting at the level of foreign ministers,” Mammadyarov said.

Nagorno-Karabakh is inside Azerbaijan but populated mostly by ethnic
Armenians, who have run it and seven contiguous districts since an
uneasy 1994 cease-fire ended six years of full-scale war. There are
sporadic border clashes.